


Grey

by Lyledebeast



Category: Robin Hood (BBC 2006)
Genre: Afterlife, Everyone is Dead, Gen, Inaccurate Catholicism, Season 3 AU, contrition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-11-03 20:08:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10974450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyledebeast/pseuds/Lyledebeast
Summary: After Guy's death, he is unexpectedly reunited with Marian.  These months of being dead have given her a lot of time to think.





	Grey

**Author's Note:**

> Purgatory is not part of my faith tradition (I'm Episcopalian), so inaccuracies abound. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, purgatory is "a place or condition of temporal punishment, departing this life in God's grace, are not entirely free from venial faults, or have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions." 
> 
> Now, it's my understanding that the only way for souls to move from purgatory into heaven is through intercession, the prayers of the living (mostly) for the souls of the dead. That doesn't really work for the purposes of this fic. Here, I have chosen to make purgatory a place where people reflect on their unrepented sins and attain heaven by acknowledging and atoning for these.
> 
> This fic acknowledges the marriage that takes place between Robin and Marian in 2x13, but shipping isn't really the point here.

Guy awoke to find himself lying on his back, looking up at a heavy grey sky.  He had known within moments of feeling Vaisey and Isabella’s blades enter his flesh that he would die.  Miraculous recoveries happened to the likes of Robin Hood, not to him.  But, strangely, he didn’t feel the pain of his wounds anymore, and he certainly didn’t feel the fire he expected to engulf him when he died.

Cautiously, he rose and looked around.  It was a colorless, lonely place, the terrain marred with rough, rocks and surrounded by craggy hillsides. The cold gnawed at his hands and face. No plants grew there except the pitiful short grass, and Guy could see no animals or birds.  Finally, he caught a glimpse of something that was not grey in the distant hills.  He could not make out what it was, but he felt himself drawn towards it.  Stumbling over rocks on his upward hike made progress slow, but as he drew nearer, he saw that the figure was a woman in a white tunic with long, unbound chestnut hair.

Suddenly, she stood, coming down the hillside to meet him.  Only when she was standing right in front of him did he recognize her.  He fell to his knees, his head dropping down between his outstretched arms.

“Marian,” he whispered as the tears gathered in his eyes.  “Forgive me.”

“Stand up, Guy of Gisborne.”

Her voice was soft and calm, with no anger in it, but still authoritative.

Guy tried to do as she said, but his legs seemed to have lost their strength.  For a moment, Marian simply stood and watched him struggle, but then slowly, tentatively,  she reached out her hand.  Guy took it, and she helped him stand.

“I’m . . . sorry, Marian.  So sorry.” His voice quavered as he fought to hold his emotions in check. “I thought . . . I didn’t think I would ever see you again.”

The corners of her mouth turned up into a tiny smile, “Nor I you, Guy.  But here we are.”

He looked around, and the sky to have grown lower and greyer. “What is this place?” he murmured, meeting her eyes again.

“Come now, Guy,” she urged.  “You’re no stranger to the church’s teachings.  Your presence at confession and mass was the talk of Nottingham when we . . . back then.  This is not hell, obviously, but it isn’t heaven either.”

“Purgatory,” he gasped, his eyes widening as he looked around again.

“Is it not what you thought it would be?”

“I . . . I never thought I’d see it.” Then his eyes moved back to her in sudden realization. “But . . . why are you here? If anyone deserves to go to heaven . . .”

Her quiet laughter silenced him.  “Oh, I thought the same, Guy!” she cried.  “You can’t imagine how surprised I was, how long I was plagued by disbelief.  But I . . . am as you see me.”

He looked over her again.  He recognized the tunic now; he had driven his broadsword through it, through the middle of her body.  “You did nothing wrong, Marian.  You stood up for your people, for your king.  You never killed anyone needlessly, nor stole but to feed the poor.”

Guy’s words surprised him, but though he had never spoken it out loud before, he knew that it was true.

“Let’s sit down, Guy,” she suggested, lowering herself to the ground.  “I think we have much to say to each other.”

Marian leaned back on her elbows, and Guy stretched out on his back, looking at the sky again.  The ground was cold, but he hardly felt it. He tried frantically to come up with the perfect words, words that could convey how sorry he was for cutting her life so tragically short, how much he had learned from her, and how he regretted his failure to put it into practice, to help her when she was alive.   But they evaded his grasp, leaving him mute.  Then she began to speak, startling him.

“When I understood where I was, I wracked my brain to think what it was I’d done, what unconfessed sin had I committed, that would bring me here.  I helped the poor, I fought for the king.  Not in battle, like Robin, but in my own way.  I attended mass and confession.  It occurred to me, perhaps it was because of my father.”

“But . . . you loved him,” Guy interjected.  “You were distraught by his death . . .”

“Yes, but I was a willful and disrespectful child,” she continued.  “I disobeyed him and made all kinds of trouble for him with the sheriff.  The last time I we spoke, I told him I was ashamed of him.”

She paused with a little sniff, and Guy could see her mouth drawn tight.  Those words affected her even now.  She sniffed again and wiped at her eyes.  “But . . . I don’t think that’s what I’m here.”

Guy blinked in confusion, his own thoughts abandoned.  What could she mean?

“I asked God for forgiveness every day after my father died.  I knew that I was to blame, and I prayed for his soul, and for him to know how much I did love him.  But there was one sin that I never confessed, that I refused to even see as a sin until . . . until it was too late.”

Guy slowly sat up, leaning closer to her in curious expectation.  He had realized after discovering that she was the Night Watchman that he didn’t know her as well as he thought, but now he wasn’t sure if he had ever known her at all.

“It was my treatment of you.”

Guy’s eyes widened and his mouth fell open.

“Marian, no.”

“Yes, Guy.” For the first time since she began, she turned to look at him.  He could see the tears standing in her eyes.

“I knew that there was goodness in you, and I knew that you were in love with me. And I exploited that, with no thought for how it would affect you.  I was cruel and deceitful, and I told myself that my reasons were righteous.  That I was helping the poor, and the king, and that your pain didn’t matter because you were an evil man who tried to force me into marrying you.  Even when I knew that wasn’t true, when I knew that you were ready to die for me, I . . . I didn’t stop.” The tears began to fall.

Guy sat up, reaching for her, but then letting his arms fall again in helpless desperation.

“Marian . . . I . . . I can’t believe that’s the reason.  All you were trying to do was help people, and I was no help to you.  I wanted to, so much . . . but the sheriff.”

Guy gasped in surprise as Marian took his hand in hers.

“Guy, please listen.”

He froze, unable to do anything but look down at their joined hands and feel the warmth of her skin.

“I have thought . . . so many times about you and the sheriff.  Why would you choose a man like that, a madman, who treated you so terribly? I thought it was for power, but what power did you ever have? How could you ever have defied him, and survived, without help? And I didn’t help you.”

With a deep sigh, he gently pulled his hand out of her grasp.  “You were in love with Robin, Marian.  Why would you help me?”

She wiped her tears away with her sleeve and lay back again, resuming her former posture.  “I did love him, Guy.  I love him still.  That shouldn’t have stopped me from being your friend.  You saved me from the sheriff, as scared as you were.  That should have been enough for me, and for Robin.”

Guy stared down at the grass.  Her revelation was almost overwhelming to his exhausted mind; try as he might, he simply could not understand.

“I . . . I should be asking for your forgiveness,” she said, barely above a whisper.

He snapped his head up to look at her. Suddenly, he knew just what to say. “No, Marian.  I have nothing to forgive you for,” he insisted.  “But I . . . I murdered you.  I stole the future from you . . . from all three of us.  I committed an unforgivable sin.”

A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth as she watched him.  “Oh, Guy,” she said softly, with affection; “this will take a while, I can see.”

Bewildered, Guy knit his brows as he looked at her. “What will?”

She shook her head, her smile growing as she spoke. “If you’ve committed an unforgiveable sin, what are you doing in purgatory? Don’t you know that everyone who comes here will spend eternity with God? It just takes time.  You’ve committed sins, to be sure, but you must have atoned for some of them.  And I suspect you must have done some good things too.”

Guy shrugged, looking away.  “I . . . well . . . I helped Robin save our brother.”

Peering up at her shyly, he saw her eyebrows raised high and her mouth open in curious delight.

“Now, that’s a story I must hear!”

Guy told her, stopping at various times to answer her questions, starting with his imprisonment by Isabella. When he got to the conversation he and Robin had at the York tavern, stopped him with a bark of laughter.

“The thought of you and Robin planning a rescue together! I can scarcely imagine it.  How I wish that I could have been there.”

Gingerly, he reached towards her, taking her hand.  “I wish you had, too.”

He continued on until he reached his and Robin’s last battle, the one that had killed him, and would soon kill Robin.  With great caution, he presented his last moments with his short-time friend, trying to give him all the credit that was due.  As he closed, he watched Marian closely, She was looking off into the distance, down the hill.

“Poor Robin,” she sighed.

Guy nodded in agreement.  “But I’m sure the gang got him out of the castle.  I’m sure they made the end as comfortable for him as they could.”

She looked back at him, and for the first time since he arrival, it was she who looked confused.  “That’s not what I mean.  I’m sure they did, but what I meant is, how is he going to cope with being here? As surprised as I was . . . we’ll have to help him, Guy.”

His brow furrowed as he took in her words.  “Are you sure?”

She answered him with a sigh.  “I see him,” she said, pointing down to the hill’s base. “He’s on his way.”

Just as she said, when Guy turned he saw Robin struggling up the same rocking incline he himself had travelled hours before.  He stood, helping Marian to her feet to welcome him.

The nearer he drew, the wider his eyes seemed to grow.  When he finally stood before them, he could only look back and forth between the two in shocked silence.

“Marian,” he began in a tremulous voice, his gaze lingering on Guy before moving back to her.  “Where are we? What is this place?”

Guy watched as she reached for her husband.  “It’s alright, my love,” she cooed.  “I’m sure you have a lot of questions, but don’t be afraid.  Guy and I will help you.”


End file.
